Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 162

No less controversial than the rulings on illegally seized evidence are the Court’s decisions on unconstitutionally obtained confessions. The Fifth Amendment provides for a number of protections for individuals, among them that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” The Supreme Court has expanded the scope of the protection against self-incrimination from criminal trials, as the amendment dictates, to grand jury proceedings, legislative investigations, and even police interrogations. It is this last extension that has proved most controversial.

In 1966 the Warren Court ruled, in Miranda v. Arizona, that police had to inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present during questioning to prevent them from incriminating themselves. The Miranda rights are familiar to viewers of police dramas: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. . . .” If a lawyer could show that a defendant had not been “read” his or her rights, information gained in the police interrogation would not be admissible in court. Like the exclusionary rule, the Miranda ruling could and did result in criminals going free even though the evidence existed to convict them.

Reacting to public and political accusations that the Warren Court was soft on crime, Congress passed the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which allowed confessions to be used in federal courts not according to the Miranda ruling, but according to the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding the confession. In 2000, despite the fact that some justices had been highly critical of the Miranda ruling over the years, the Court upheld the 1966 decision, stating that it had become an established part of the culture, and held the 1968 Crime Control Act to be unconstitutional.⁸³